Close-up of two hands, with a small black crown, letter K and spade tattoo on one finger and a small red outlined symbol tattoo on the neighbouring finger.

Crown, letter and spade tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are held together, with small tattoos on adjacent fingers. The right finger carries a black crown above a letter K with a cross at its top and a solid spade below. The left finger shows a small red outlined heart-like shape above a red letter and flourish, with purple nail polish on that hand.

Fine line Hand Crown Spade Heart Letter Playing card

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king of spades slid across the oilcloth and stopped against my glass, and Nell Tripp didn't even glance at it. She was watching my right hand, the one that had rested so politely on the table's edge since the lamps were lit. Outside the Gull and Anchor the tide dragged shingle back and forth like a dog with a sock, and nobody in the back room had spoken for a full minute.

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We were playing for the Sally Ann, a crabber with a split mast and a debt to the chandler at Scarrow Quay. My father had put her up as a joke, and Nell had called the joke. Winter kitchens teach you to read a table, and she had taught me to read a crown from across a smoky room, the way a king sits a fraction higher than the rest of the pack.

The summer we were nineteen, we'd sat at her mother's table with a sewing needle and a pot of cheap ink and made our own marks, one small crown on her finger, one small spade on mine, so that whatever cards either of us was dealt, we'd always know whose hand was whose. It was a daft thing to do at nineteen, and I had never once regretted it.

She laid her cards down slow: four spades, all of them ace-high. I laid down my queen of hearts and watched her face fall, then remembered the card I had really been holding was the one she had slipped into my sleeve an hour before, when she'd shaken my hand to say goodnight. "You kept the boat," she said, and pushed the pot toward me. "I'll keep the sea." I still have the king she gave me, folded soft in my wallet, crown uppermost, so I always know which way the wind is blowing.